Set Your Clocks For Rockabilly Gods: Godshaper In April From Boom

by Staff

When I heard Boom! Studios announced one of their upcoming April titles, Godshaper, my ears immediately pricked up. Written by the hugely talented Simon Spurrier(The Spire, currently Suicide Squad, Six Gun Gorrilla, X-Men, The Weavers, Cry Havoc) and illustrated by newcomer Jonas Goonface, the series explores concepts of super-powers, godhood, technology, and more.

I’ve followed Spurrier’s work for a good long while in his mad combination of being both incredibly smart and unfailingly entertaining, and in 2016, I had the pleasure of looking over Jonas Goonface’s self-published and highly accomplished creator-owned work. As a fan of both creators, seeing them team up is very rewarding, and makes me want to highly recommend this upcoming series to you. This is a team where both members are rare fonts of creative storytelling.

Boom! Studios introduce the series thus:

Discover a world where super-powered gods have replaced technology, and every human has a private, guardian-deity of their very own…though unfortunately for Ennay, some exceptions apply. Men and women like him are Shapers: born godless, but with the ability to mold and recalibrate the gods of others. Paired with Bud, a friendly deity without a human, they go on the road looking for food, shelter, and a paying gig. Despite their efforts to keep a low profile, Ennay and Bud stumble upon a mystery that will have lasting ramifications for god and man alike.

Spurrier has described the series as set in an alternative reality where worship has replaced technology and money as humans employ gods to do the work and act as currency. Spurrier further explains:

Drench it in an exhausted late-’50s aesthetic—all greaser quiffs and hotrod bullies—fill it with monsters and mobsters, get it drawn by literally the most exciting young newcomer in comics today…and away you go. Like all good genre fiction, Godshaperhas the means to say a loooooot about our own world, and—sure—it’s packed to the brim with tasty thematic platefuls of religion, greed, prejudice, consumerism, vanity, crime, war… It’s all there. But at its big, throbbing heart this is a story about two super-likable outcasts on a surreal, scary, sexy, and utterly singular journey through a world which hates them.

Artist Jonas Goonface adds his own take:

Look on in suspense and wonder as this odd couple of down-and-out hobo rascals hustle their way by hook or by crook across an unforgiving rockabilly America where capitalism is literally deified.

This series is going to be flat-out thought-provoking craziness filtered through Jonas Goonface’s bold fresh art style. We can get a glimpse of the interior artwork below: